EASTER · 23 APRIL
Saint George of Lydda
Martyr · d. 303 · Patron of England
O God, who didst give thy servant George strength to refuse the world's incense and to lay down his life rather than deny thee; Grant that we, however small and plain our own witness may seem beside his legend, may hold to it as faithfully as he held to his, even unto death; through Jesus Christ our Saviour, who is the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever.
What can actually be said of George is very little, and it is worth saying plainly before anything else is added to it. He was a soldier of Greek descent from Cappadocia, serving in the Roman army — by tradition in Diocletian's own guard — when the emperor's edict went out requiring every soldier to sacrifice to the old gods or be discharged and worse. George refused, was arrested, endured a long and by every account brutal torture meant to break him rather than simply kill him, and was beheaded outside Lydda on the twenty-third of April in the year 303. That is very nearly the whole of the historical record. No dragon appears in it anywhere.
One detail from the earliest layer of the tradition is worth keeping, because it is small enough to be plausible and strange enough to be memorable: a woman who witnessed his execution — later tradition names her the Empress Alexandra — is said to have been so struck by the manner of his dying that she declared herself a Christian on the spot, and was killed for it. A single act of constancy, in other words, that seems to have converted at least one other death into a witness of its own, within living memory of the event. Constantine built a church over George's tomb at Lydda within a generation. The cult was already old by the time anyone thought to write a story about it.
The dragon belongs to a different century entirely. It surfaces in the West around 1260, in Jacobus de Voragine's Golden Legend, nearly a thousand years after George died — a village threatened by a serpent, a princess offered as its next meal, a soldier-saint who kills the beast and converts the town rather than accepting any reward. It is a good story, and it did exactly what such stories do: it took an obscure Eastern martyr, already venerated across the Byzantine world for his plain refusal to burn incense to Caesar, and gave him a shape that Western Christendom, freshly returned from Crusade and newly in love with chivalric romance, could not resist. William Caxton printed the Golden Legend in English in the fifteenth century and the story never left. Nothing in it is history. Nearly everything about why it endured is.
England's claim on George dates from exactly that moment — Crusaders carrying his cult home, Edward III making him patron of the Order of the Garter in 1348, his red cross eventually becoming the flag of a nation that had never known him in life and had no better reason to choose him than that his story had reached them at the right moment in their own history. It is not, on reflection, an exclusive claim. Georgia the country, Catalonia, Portugal, Ethiopia, and Moscow all made the same claim on the same saint for reasons of their own, and none of them needed the dragon any more than England did. What every one of these claims actually rests on, once the legend is set aside, is the same bare fact that Lydda's earliest Christians already knew: a soldier was ordered to burn a pinch of incense, would not, and was killed for it. Nothing about that fact requires a monster to be worth thirteen centuries of remembering.
Almighty God, who out of the bare witness of a single soldier's death didst raise up a devotion that has crossed a hundred generations and as many nations; Grant that we, who so easily love the story more than we imitate the courage, may look past the dragon to the plainer and harder thing it was invented to honour, and find there strength for our own witness; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.